Prosecution Closing Statement (Open Session) Page 26769
Procedural Matters
1 Tuesday, 19 August 2008
2 [Prosecution Closing Statement]
3 [Open session]
4 [The accused entered court]
5 [The Accused Lazarevic not present]
6 --- Upon commencing at 9.02 a.m.
7 THE REGISTRAR: Good morning, Your Honours. This is case number
8 IT-05-87-T, the Prosecutor versus Milan Milutinovic et al. Thank you.
9 JUDGE BONOMY: Good morning, everyone. Today's hearing and the
10 subsequent hearings to complete the case are those during which we will
11 hear closing arguments for all parties. Mr. Bakrac, we've been advised
12 of the state of health of Mr. Lazarevic, who is recovering from
13 treatment, I understand, and I see that he's not present in court this
14 morning. I understand that he is content that these hearings should
15 proceed in his absence. Can you confirm that, please?
16 MR. BAKRAC: [Interpretation] Yes, Your Honour, I can confirm
17 that. I was with him yesterday in the prison hospital, and he agreed
18 that we continue the proceedings without his presence.
19 JUDGE BONOMY: Thank you, Mr. Bakrac, for confirming that.
20 We will now proceed to hear the closing arguments for the
21 Prosecution.
22 Mr. Hannis.
23 MR. HANNIS: Thank you, Mr. President and Your Honours. For the
24 record, I'm Tom Hannis on behalf of the Office of the Prosecution. I'm
25 joined today by our case manager, Mr. Ian Reid, trial attorney
Tuesday, 19 August 2008 Case No. IT-05-87-T
Prosecution Closing Statement (Open Session) Page 26770
Submissions by Mr. Hannis
1 Daniela Kravetz, and my co-senior trial attorney, Mr. Chester Stamp. It
2 is an honour, Your Honours, to appear before you again this one last
3 time. The weight of my responsibility to address remarks to you about
4 the Prosecution's case weighs heavily upon me, but I feel confident that
5 there is substantial evidence to support the arguments that we will be
6 making. I guess in context to the time, Your Honours, I feel a little
7 bit like I'm at the Olympic finals of trial advocacy. I hope I can at
8 least make the finals, if not earn a medal.
9 We're here to talk about the crimes that were committed in Kosovo
10 in 1999. The Prosecution has said in our indictment and throughout this
11 trial that these six accused were participants in a joint criminal
12 enterprise, the purpose of which was to modify the ethnic balance in
13 Kosovo in order to ensure continued Serb control over that province. And
14 before I go on to speak about that, Your Honours, I should explain to you
15 the order in which we intend to proceed.
16 I'm going to make some introductory remarks in terms of an
17 overview, talk a little bit about the background leading up to these
18 crimes. Ms. Kravetz will follow me and speak briefly about the pattern
19 of the crimes and the crime base and why people left Kosovo in the spring
20 of 1999. She will be followed by Mr. Stamp who will talk about the
21 bodies evidence that's been a big part of this case and about the
22 individual responsibility of Mr. Milutinovic, Mr. Sainovic, and
23 General Lukic. Then you will hear from me a second time. I'll address
24 the individual criminal responsibility of our military accused,
25 General Ojdanic, General Pavkovic, and General Lazarevic. And we will
1 conclude with some general observations about the evidence and the
2 approach that I would like to suggest that Your Honours follow in
3 reviewing all the evidence that you've seen and heard in this case.
4 Now, as I said, this joint criminal enterprise to alter the
5 ethnic balance to help maintain Serb control in Kosovo was -- was to be
6 achieved by criminal means, and in this case those criminal means took
7 the form of a widespread and systematic campaign of terror and violence
8 directed at the Kosovo Albanian population.
9 Now, the man with a plan about carrying this out was
10 Slobodan Milosevic. And one of the first and most, I guess, chilling
11 examples of the fact that he had a plan and the nature of the plan is
12 found during a 24 October 1998 meeting that Mr. Milosevic had with
13 General Naumann and General Clark. You heard the evidence of
14 General Naumann when he was here and he told us how during that meeting
15 after the agreement had been signed, Mr. Milosevic became agitated and
16 said that a final solution to the Kosovo problem would be found in the
17 spring, and when Naumann and Clark pressed Mr. Milosevic for an
18 explanation of what he -- what he meant by that exactly, he said, "We'll
19 do what we did in Drenica in 1946." They weren't quite familiar what
20 that was, they asked him to explain and he said, "We got them all
21 together and shot them." And indeed in March through May 1999, you see
22 examples of those kind of crimes of people being taken away and shot, of
23 people being forced to leave their homes. These crimes in March through
24 May 1999, we say, were the next logical step in a series of ever more
25 oppressive measures to try to deal with the Kosovo problem, and these go
1 back, Your Honour, 10 or 20 years before the crimes.
2 Now, with regard to the participants in the joint criminal
3 enterprise, let me show you the next slide. We have Mr. Milosevic,
4 President Milutinovic. He was a part of the Supreme Defence Council
5 which we say later came to be called the Supreme Command during the state
6 of war, and the Supreme Command directed and controlled and made
7 decisions about the use of the VJ, the army, during the conflict.
8 Heading the VJ during that time was General Ojdanic as chief of the
9 Supreme Command Staff as it was known during the wartime. Directly
10 subordinate to him was General Pavkovic, commander of the 3rd Army. And
11 his immediate subordinate commanding the Pristina Corps was
12 General Lazarevic who was commander over the VJ brigades and later the
13 Pristina military district was resubordinated to him. We say those
14 forces were a substantial portion of the forces that helped carry out the
15 crimes in Kosovo in 1999 during the war.
16 Also in this joint criminal enterprise, we say, was Mr. Sainovic
17 who played a significant role through his activities with the
18 Joint Command, both in 1998, particularly during the time that the 1998
19 plan for the suppression of terrorism was carried out, and also we say in
20 1999.
21 Helping complete the membership in the joint criminal enterprise,
22 those participants who had an active role in engaging the forces that
23 actually committed the crimes hands-on, General Lukic, head of the MUP
24 staff in Kosovo.
25 Now, I just want to address briefly the forces that were involved
1 in the crimes. We have the Yugoslav army. And, Your Honour, for
2 everyone who is watching, if you want to see the visuals that I'm
3 referring to they're on the e-court channel as these slides come up.
4 The Serb forces or the Yugoslav army, the VJ, both active and
5 reserve in the Ministry of Interior. Police active and reserve. The
6 military district, particularly the military territorial detachments, and
7 others including what we've referred to in several instances as the armed
8 non-Siptar population. We'll talk more about that later.
9 Just -- I'd like to put up quickly one slide showing the command
10 structure of the army. This is an attachment, I believe, to our final
11 brief and an exhibit in the case.
12 One more slide for you is a slide showing Kosovo and the general
13 outlines and the areas of responsibility of the VJ brigades active in
14 Kosovo in 1999. And the 125th under Colonel Zivanovic. The 549th under
15 General Delic, 243rd under Colonel Jelic, the 15th Armoured Brigade under
16 Colonel Gergar. The MUP. I'll put up the slide showing the structure
17 and you'll see that General Lukic was head of the MUP staff and where
18 they fit into the organisational structure. We have the military
19 district, and we'll talk more later about their role.
20 The others included Ministry of Defence units such as the
21 Civil Defence and civil protection, local or village defence, armed
22 non-Siptar population, the paramilitaries, and volunteers.
23 Now, how were all these bodies engaged and how were they
24 controlled and used to take part in these crimes? Well, in part through
25 various coordination and control entities. First of all, we had the SDC,
1 the Supreme Defence Council, and as it was known during wartime the
2 Supreme Command. For the army we had the VJ General Staff prior to the
3 commencement and the state of war and then became known as the
4 Supreme Command staff during the state of war. For the MUP forces in
5 Kosovo we had the MUP staff.
6 And then there was another body that we talked about a lot in
7 this case and we will talk about a lot during these closing remarks.
8 That was the Joint Command, and I will address that in some detail when I
9 return to speak later on at the end of the day or tomorrow.
10 Now, the plan or common purpose of this joint criminal enterprise
11 was to maintain Serb control of the province by altering the ethnic
12 balance, and that occurred primarily by removing ethnic Albanians from
13 Kosovo. This wasn't a plan that developed in an instant. We say this
14 was something that developed over time, over a long period of time, after
15 other efforts to deal with the Kosovo problem had proved unsuccessful.
16 And in simple terms, the Kosovo problem was too many Albanians, too many
17 Albanians with separatist intentions and the effect that had on the Serbs
18 who lived in Kosovo.
19 There's a lot more detail about this in our brief, Your Honours,
20 I think beginning at paragraphs 28 to 83. I just want to highlight some
21 of these key points.
22 During the 1980s, one of the principal grievances of Serb
23 nationalists circles was that the constitution of the SFRY gave Kosovo
24 substantial autonomy, and as a result of that, Kosovo Serbs were
25 vulnerable to discrimination by a government that was dominated by ethnic
1 Albanians in Kosovo.
2 By the early 1990s, we say the preservation of Serbian control in
3 Kosovo had become central to Mr. Milosevic and Serbian policy. There
4 were a number of legislative changes that began to occur in late 1998.
5 In the spring of 1999, you've heard the evidence about special measures
6 that were introduced in Kosovo. And in March of 1999, the
7 Serbian Assembly proposed amendments to the Serbian constitution that
8 would in effect strip Kosovo of most of its autonomy.
9 And in late March 1989, Kosovo's autonomy indeed was effectively
10 revoked. We have evidence that police repression against Kosovo
11 Albanians increased dramatically after that point in time. We have
12 evidence from Fred Abrahams, Veton Surroi, Adnan Merovci, and
13 Ibrahim Rugova, among others, held during the 1990s most of the Kosovo
14 Albanian language schools were closed. Most of the employees of ethnic
15 Albanian nature were fired from the University of Pristina. Kosovo
16 Albanians were dismissed from managerial and directorial positions. And
17 yet in spite of that during that time period in the early 1990s, the
18 Kosovo Albanians primarily pursued a policy of civil resistance and they
19 did establish an unofficial parallel system of health care and education,
20 but the problem persisted.
21 The Serbian authorities made attempts to address the problem in
22 Kosovo by bringing more Serbs into Kosovo, some of the Serb refugees from
23 the conflicts elsewhere in Yugoslavia, but those efforts we say also did
24 not prove to be very successful. The problem continued. On the Albanian
25 side the -- the more outspoken critics of the Serb policy began to
1 support violence as an alternate means to deal with the problem.
2 Mr. Rugova and his policies lost favour with substantial numbers of those
3 individuals, and the violence in Kosovo increased.
4 We say this led to the formation of the Joint Command in 1998 in
5 conjunction with the 1998 plan to suppress terrorism. And finally, when
6 that also failed to adequately solve the problem, we say it led to the
7 1999 crimes under cover of the NATO conflict.
8 Now, the Defence has argued throughout the trial and in their
9 closing briefs that there was no plan, that there was no joint criminal
10 enterprise. We say, Your Honour, and when we wrap up our arguments we
11 will hope to have presented several details and examples to support our
12 primary argument that the existence of the plan to modify the ethnic
13 balance in Kosovo by criminal means is the only reasonable inference to
14 be drawn from the totality of the evidence in this case.
15 Now, the plan or common purpose doesn't have to be written down
16 in a document or declared in a speech. I say since the end of
17 World War II and Nazi Germany people who make a decision to engage in a